The Clock app may not be the most exciting one to come pre-installed on your phone, but it's one of the most important. Alarms get you to work or school on time, and if one fails to go off, that can lead to trouble. It's one thing to sleep through a class because you forgot. It's another when you wake up only to see that your phone restarted overnight and didn't boot because it needs to decrypt.

With Direct Boot support, the latest Clock update protects against that scenario. When a phone reboots on its own, your Android Nougat device will continue to get notifications and deliver alarms.

Clock can do this because of new Android N support, which also arrives in this update alongside multi-window support. This is the version of the app that's available in the fourth developer preview, and it does not backport features to Android Marshmallow. Nonetheless, here's the changelog and a link to APK Mirror if you're not yet seeing the update in the Play Store.

What's New:

• Android N support

• Multi-window support

• Direct Boot support: alarms can now ring before the device has been unlocked

Comments

shadowx360

So any decade now, Google is going to add in the only feature I care about: alarm clock syncing across all my devices so if my phone dies, my tablet will wake me up. They already bought Timely which does this, how hard is it for Google to add it in?

Van

You'd think that would be the next logical step but nah Google ain't logical!

Dave

Maybe the Hangouts guy is working on it *fingers not crossed that tight*

Franco Rossel

Alarm syncing is coming... to iOS. Android release soon.

Dave

Maybe the Hangouts guy is hating Google that much because Google makes him work on Hangouts that he prefers to bring features to iOS first.
My classified source quotes him saying 'Imma drop dem wanted features on bitchy-ass iOS first, that'll show Google!'

How many people have ever heard of quince? I had to look it up after reading your comment to know what it was.

fijisiv

Give me a break, we're talking desserts that start with Q. :-) My choices were limited and to be honest, I had to google quince too.

James Briano

Android Rice Pudding

Chris Drysdale

Timely?

Leonardo Baez

Yeah man... Timely is from Google too, have the same options, plus multi device sync. That is why I still use it.

tehboogieman

Timely was an excellent app that Google bought which had syncing, but then they basically abandoned it and it doesn't work very well on many devices today.

Suicide_Note

Works fine on all my devices, and wakes me up on time every morning.

Actually getting out of bed on time, well, that's a different story. lol

Đức Thành

I set like 7 alarms each morning just to get out of bed on time
I feel like life would've been a lot easier if I was a more diligent person... and I would actually get to sleep more that way too. Glad to see I'm not the only one being this irrational.

tehboogieman

Works fine for me as well, but there are many reports of alarms not working any more all over Reddit, XDA and play store reviews. Seems to be an issue on newer versions of Android

It's a board problem, not an os one, mtk devices can ring alarms from a powered off device since years..

Android Developer

If the alarm does something when the device is off, it means the device isn't really off. It still takes electricity...

pfmiller

Computers have hardware clocks that remain running even when the device is off. The power used is pretty much inconsequential.

Android Developer

Indeed, but they don't have the monitor being turned on automatically with sound from setting an alarm.
Computers actually have a battery for the clock itself, just to avoid being un-synced from the time. It doesn't serve as anything else.

pfmiller

Sure, but the hardware clock could be set up to trigger the firmware to do something. That's how feature phones have been doing this for over a decade.

Android Developer

Doesn't it mean the OS is listening to this event?

Dick Dastardly✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ᵉᵛᶦˡ

The old Nokia Symbian era phones had this and it hardly put a dent in the battery life. Xiaomi and OnePlus Android phones have this feature and it doesn't affect the battery life either. Think about it, you set an alarm for 5 in the morning and you go to sleep at 10. In case of other phones you probably put the phone on airplane mode to best save power and then doze kicks in. On a Xiaomi or OnePlus phone you turn it off, even if the OS is listening to this event it would still consume way less power than the device being on, even with airplane+doze. Now its just a question of proper implementation.

Android Developer

I think that what you call "turn off" for the old phones, is just airplane-mode on smartphones.
Can you show any link about the feature you are talking about?

Dick Dastardly✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ᵉᵛᶦˡ

I doubt it since the old phones also had an airplane-mode. All airplane-mode does is turn off all the radios but other background OS level processes keep on running.

Why don't you think it's similar? It sounds to do the same thing, except for also turning off the screen.
About a link, I meant something more technical, that will explain how it works (on old devices).

pfmiller

No, the OS isn't running. The clock is the only thing running, and it generates a hardware signal at the correct time to the firmware. The alarm could either be a basic alarm completely within the firmware, or the phone could be booted and then set off the alarm. Its been way too long, I can't remember how it worked on my very old phones.

Regardless, the feature did save my ass a few times. If I forgot to charge my phone overnight and the phone shut down due to low power the alarm would still go off at the correct time.

Android Developer

Seems like a great feature. What is this feature name, and can you find any reference and explanation to it over the internet?
I'd like to request this feature for Android (here: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/ ) , though they might have just write that it has nothing to do with AOSP.

Yeah, as others said, I want "Clock" to show up in Google Drive's "Manage Backups" section. With sync across devices. Btw I have seen several new apps show up there during the recent 3-4 days, apps that never have been there before (and not all of them were updated recently). Did Google change anything in their backup approach? (Mainly Swedish apps most people here probably have never heard of, such as Reseplanerare, SF Bio and SVT Play. Also SleepTimer and... Runkeeper, I think? not sure).

Jordan L

I hope they changed something, they have a powerful backup option that no one is using!!!! Not even Google.

Xenotrumpet

Is no one else gonna talk about the fact that Night Mode still doesn't support Immersive Mode, leaving on-screen buttons vulnerable to AMOLED burn-in?

demarcmj

No, because that has nothing to do with alarms

pezjono

This is the main reason I disabled encryption. Screwed me over a couple times on overnight reboots only to sleep in with no alarm, notifications, calls. Nothing.

andy_o

you can just disable pattern/pin on boot, no need to disable encryption.

jimv1983

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what this means by encryption. My Nexus 5X is encrypted by default out of the box. If I restart the phone the alarms work just fine with no need for me to do anything.

ShadyBrady

It's only if you have a pin/pattern setup to be entered upon boot. So, if you turn your phone off, and turn it back on, you would have to enter your pin/pattern before it even finishes booting up (not just unlocking the phone.)

Gjorgi Lazarovski

You're forgetting that you have to enter your pin/pattern for the phone to fully boot up. So if you are asleep and the phone suddenly bootloops during the night, the alarms will go off even if the device is still not fully booted up. Till now you would have missed those alarms.

jimv1983

When I reboot my phone it fully boots without a pattern/pin/fingerprint. The pattern/pin/fingerprint is just required to unlock and use the phone. Once you get to the lock screen the phone is fully booted.

This new feature must apply to some other level of encryption than what is enabled on my Nexus 5X out of the box.

It's old by now but the picture reminded me: I hate swipe-to-snooze. When I wake up, I'm not exactly in the clearest state of mind. i have swiped towards the 'turn off alarm' side when I meant 'snooze' more times than I can count. (I mean I have like three alarms set just in case, but still)

pantagruel

Samsung clock app has tiny button for snooze and swipe to dismiss. Not sure whether I'd prefer it in reverse order, but hey, it beats Google clock in this regard.

Android Developer

" alarms can now ring before the device has been unlocked"
So it wasn't this way before? What about previous versions of Android?

EowynCarter

That's a new feature on N unless I'm wrong.

Android Developer

So if I install an alarm clock app, and restarts the OS, it means the alarm won't work till I unlock the lock-screen?
I've tested it now on 6.0.1 , and it does seem this way. The icon of the alarm clock does doesn't appear, so I think it is not active.
I don't even have a lock screen with a password.
After showing the notifications (without unlocking), I think the icon of the alarm clock app got shown .
How odd.

NTron

And you call yourself an Android developer??? This only means if you have your device encrypted, at boot it asks for a password, direct boot is to avoid random reboots on encrypted phones causing people to have no alarms because their device hasnt been unencrypted yet. This is nothing to do with the lockscreen.

Android Developer

Yes, just because I am developing apps for Android doesn't mean I know everything related to it, so please avoid discussing private matters.
The content of the article says "before the device has been unlocked", which is why I wrote about unlocking the lock screen.

Having the device encrypted (which I think is the default behavior) never asked me for a password, not even after a reboot of the device. Why would you say that it will cause random reboot?

I'm sorry, but I still don't get it.

EowynCarter

You can set it not to ask for pin when booting.

Android Developer

To what this sentence is referring to?

anon

This update seems to have broken my Nexus 6p

Caio Kallas Vasconcellos

What about ringing The alarm with the phone off, like my now 10 years old Nokia does?

Fatal1ty_93_RUS

Gotta say when I looked at the article title, I thought "Direct Boot" meant something else other than interacting with an app from the lockscreen

Indianajonze

boy that purchase of timely is really paying off these days with updates like this

Rekcus

Cool feature; direct boot. But Timely still rules for me, need the problem solving features to enable snooze, would never wake up otherwise...